the breakfast view
5 July 2022
4 June 2022
I'm up for the last sunrise of this trip.
A loon floats on the water,
then takes flight.
From above, a tiny spider balloons in. I reach out my hand and let it land on me. I place it on the balcony. The Spider Cam is inside. I do what I can with the Canon PowerShot, which is not very good at macro.
I think it's a Zygiella x-notata.
I'm hoping this Ziggy will stick around to become the 28th balcony resident. But Ziggy wants to move on.
Still attached to a strand of silk, Ziggy moves to the top of the balcony and catches the next breeze. Aloft, Ziggy hangs in my field of view for a few more minutes before the wind carries the silk northward. Like me, this Ziggy has to move on.
I focus my attention back to the sunrise.
We're not sleeping in too late this morning. We want to be on the road to Portland in time for Jack to visit a used bookstore there. We have fog this morning.
And a row of poofy little clouds.
I walk to the edge of the patio where the pool and breakfast tables are for some photos.
It's that sad time, finally: checkout. The car is loaded. I take our keys to the front desk in the main building and then go for a quick walk to the docks.
Margaret Todd's first sail will be at 2:00 today. We'll be long gone.
As I walk back up the dock towards the hotel, three people on gravel bikes stop at the head of the boardwalk. "It's a beautiful day for this," one of them says.
Indeed it is. I look towards the peir, where the parking lot is filling up.
I zoom in to the sand bar. The tide is out. People are walking across. It's Bar Harbor. Life goes on.
See you next year, Porcupine.
The drive to Portland is about three hours and uneventful. We're staying at the Holiday Inn again. This time, we have a view of the Casco Bay harbor from the ninth floor.
Could I live in Portland? It's a small city. There's a path along the northeastern edge of the peninsula that starts at Munjoy Hill and goes all the way to the Old Port area. Real estate at the top of the hill runs in the millions. What about the rest of the city though?
Unsure of how long the walk to the bookstore would take, Jack calls up a Lyft to get us there. The store is halfway up the hill, close enough to the western side of the peninsula that we can see down that way. There's a footpath that starts somewhere down the hill and goes to a path that surrounds a cove. I want to explore that tomorrow. From what I've seen on my handful of short visits, Portland's downtown reminds me of West Philadelphia in the late 1980s. There are small storefronts mixed in with houses. Everything is walkable and a bit run-down.
After the bookshop, we walk east towards Old Port. On the way, we pass a natural food co-op and
a fabric sign on a building wall: "Stay wicked fah apaht," a relic from the Covid era. (It's not over. People are simply acting as if it were.)
I haven't quite got my bearings, so when we reach the water, I can't remember if I'd walked this far south with my college friend last year. Anyway, we're in front of a tugboat fleet.
There's a gigantic tanker across the bay. It's spouting off smoke or steam or something. How long is it going to to that while it's not moving?
There's fog over there too. I assume it's going to roll in towards us. It never does.
A plastic sign floats in the water.
We turn back up to the strip of Old Port shops. There's a wine store here that Jack adores. The owner is a chatty fellow with opinions about wine that Jack finds amusing. On the street, a dapper hipster has a table and a typewriter. "Pick a topic! Get a poem!"
Could I live here? I could live here.
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